Apple is creating a market around the iPhone and iPad, and therefore changing the industry of computation, which will change the way startups (NB: this place used to be called Startup News) and hackers prioritize activities for the next few years at least.

Why do you think it doesn't matter?

And how does Apple's revenue apply to that exactly? Why does it need to be posted to HN every quarter and make top story? Everyone knows they're doing well. No one but the fanboys and shareholders care about their actual revenue/profits.

Q: Why does it need to be posted to HN every quarter and make top story?

A: Why does it need to be posted to HN [by HN users] every quarter and make top story [because HN users have voted it up]?

The community (which is why the site exists) hath spoken!

No. This conception of "the democracy makes the rules" is what turns sites into inane cat-picture/political-argument factories. Tiny democracies can work as closed systems, but when they're open to people entering/leaving them, every change will precipitate a change in membership to realign the community's interests with the change. This causes a positive feedback loop, where eventually, for example, nobody is left except Apple addicts.

Sites have purposes (otherwise, there would only need to be one website on the Internet, that served everyone's needs equally.) Letting the community decide both what, and who, the community is to be composed of, leads inevitably to every community being composed of "everyone," and having a purpose of "general interest." I, for one, would rather have a place that just has "Hacker News."

You say this, yet the submitter has been here over 1000 days, and over 100 longer than you. Evidently at least some of the long-timers, from when this was a much more closed environment, do indeed see this as interesting news.

So the question becomes: what's the definition of "hacker news", if not a user-submitted aggregator? And where do you define what is and what is not HN-worthy? It's apparently not age-related, nor precedence, nor community, and I don't know how you'd define what's hacker-related and what's not, barring strict, literal "hacks" (and then how about circuit bending to make music?).

> I, for one, would rather have a place that just has "Hacker News."

Amen, brother.

It's just the fanboys voting it up. Nothing wrong with being a fanboy, I'm just saying. This news is of no interest to the general community here, except the people who love Apple more than themselves. And apparently, there are quite a few of these people here.

I come here to read news about startups, not to indulge in Apple lovefests. If I wanted to do that, I'd be over at TechCrunch.

People that blindly hate upon everything Apple is just as bad as people that blindly love Apple.

I'm not hating on Apple. Re-read my posts and tell me one place where I said anything negative about Apple.

I'm simply asking a question - why is this news relevant to this community and why do we have to have a top-story post on it every quarter? What use is that to anyone here?

And for this simple question, I have lost almost 40 points of karma in the last hour.

Thanks everyone. What a great community.

I'm calling your bluff.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=schammy

The single submission you've made has been a link to a picture of Jobs in a 1984 motif - clearly negative about Apple.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1517087 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1306919 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1306321 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1306314 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1306310 NOTE: Those last two are the exact same comment posted twice on the same article! You literally copy and pasted an anti-Apple comment so that it appeared multiple times for the same article. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1281192

So, looking over your past 30 comments here on HN, 20% of them are negative about Apple.

You wanted people to look at your history and your history shows a negative bias against Apple.

I was talking about this conversation thread, not my posting history in general. Yeah I don't like Apple, but in this particular thread, I said nothing negative about them at all. That's what I meant. I was just asking a question, "why is this relevant to HN", and now have lost almost 100 points of karma.

What does that say about this community? Nothing good in my opinion. But obviously, anyone who doesn't drink the Apple kool-aid doesn't have a valid opinion around these parts.

I expect to lose another 20 points of karma from this post. Have at it, sheeple.

Edit: Ya know what, after all this, I just don't see the purpose of participating in this site anymore. I was asking a perfectly valid question and received almost nothing but hate in response. Obviously I'm not welcome around here. I will send an email to HN to have my account deleted.

So long.

FWIW I up'ed your initial question but down'ed some of your replies. Not due to your views of Apple (couldn't care less..), but because you seem to be acting kind of silly and trying really hard to not understand how Apple's current performance, and it's implied future performance, wouldn't be news to hackers and startups.

If you're being genuine, there's no need to leave - just try harder to understand or ignore the Apple stuff. If not, whatever.

p.s. for someone calling others "sheeple" I just want to point out that you seem rather concerned and emotional over your karma, with karma simply being an average of how those around you tend to see you.

Sheep?

>Thanks everyone. What a great community.

We do what we can to discourage repetitive whining. I'd say it works pretty well, because the site as a whole is remarkably free from it.

I do agree that going against the grain isnt very well rewarded on hn (or for most online communities for that matter). But you do have my respect for expanding the discussion space and asking what I think is a legitimate question.

It's just the fanboys; try to ignore them. They downvote anyone who expresses an opinion which they disagree with, or which they think is anti-apple. When the more sane users get to these comments, you'll regain at least a bit of your karma, probably.

Regardless of if you're a fanboy or shareholder, you should be interested in emerging and sustaining trends as an entrepreneur

I see no connection between Apple's revenue and emerging/sustaining trends.

That's more of an unfortunate thing on your part, IMO. I take this from it personally:

- Mobile is still growing like crazy

- People are willing to pay a premium for quality even in tougher economic times

- Digital distribution of Music and Software is the future (I left out movies here because Apple doesn't give a detailed breakdown, but I think this is a significant part of the iTunes revenue as well)

Information exists everywhere, the truly successful are those that can extract it.

> Mobile is still growing like crazy

So if you didn't get a top-story post on Apple's revenue from HN every quarter, you would have no idea how fast mobile is growing?

> People are willing to pay a premium for quality even in tougher economic times

So? Unless you're in the business of selling expensive hardware - and my guess is that you are not - this is irrelevant.

> Digital distribution of Music and Software is the future

We're already living in this future. The last time I bought a hard-copy retail version of software was in the 90's, and for music, at least 5 years.

You're still not getting it (or more likely being intentionally obtuse). Corporate results matter: remember the hype around the Palm Pre? If you dropped your iPhone development or even moved resources to build a Pre version of your software you made a mistake. The fact the this is on the front page is relevant to people that making strategic decisions based on market leaders.

Interestingly this site has a great feature that allows you to ignore things you believe are irrelevant: if you don't click the link you don't need to read it.

What would be actual news is Apple suddenly doing bad. At this point it's a given that they're crushing it, so having a big circlejerk every time they release insane quarterly numbers every quarter serves no purpose.

The Pre is a good example of corporate results being interesting, but that's because they were the huge underdog. Reporting that the top dog keeps getting more toppy is not interesting.

I know I can ignore stories I don't find interesting, but I usually read almost all of the top 10 stories on HN every day and Apple's quarterly results always gets in there (typically #1 for a while), so it's hard to ignore.

Oh, I'm sorry, I see the error of my ways...

Hey everyone on Hacker News, please ask schammy before up voting any story so that nothing he isn't interested in doesn't make it to the front page!

Seriously, if you only read the top 10 stories you're missing the best stuff on this site. Try not to only read popular opinion, most people are sheep

Just earlier this week I realized (consciously) how Apple basically single-handedly enabled location-based startups.

Sure, location-detection portable devices have been out for a long time, but not until the iPhone did it actually take off.

They sure as hell made it a lot easier. I was involved in a location based start up in about 2000. I was laid off in 2003, and they kept going until this year when they merged with Xora.

The most striking difference between modern location based startups and ours is how easy it is to get your application on a phone these days. I don't care how draconian Apple seems to be with getting your app on the phone, it just doesn't compare.

The company worked for months (if not years) to get the app distributed with a phone automatically (or nearly automatically), and the best we could get was that the enterprise sales group at the carrier could sell the solution to a company. You could still get our app on a phone w/o that, but it required a whole bunch of proprietary tools (that nobody would know how to get) and a serious amount of technical know-how at that. In other words, there was zero chance of someone saying, "hey, why don't we try this out for free to see if it can be of any use to us"

Perhaps this is why I don't get all in a tizzy about Apple's draconian app store practices (though, the last bits finally did get to me). I'm like a transplant from Czarist Russia who has come to post Patriot Act America.

Apple's revenue reinforces the belief that proper execution of an emerging trend works, as well as the sustained proper execution of it will keep on working.

Let's say you had a startup in an emerging market like mobile apps. Maybe the health of Apple would be relevant to that.

Yes, but everyone knows that Apple is crushing it. What would be actual news is if they suddenly lost this crazy momentum. Hence, there is no need to have a story every quarter about Apple's insane revenue. It's a given.

The only reason everyone knows that Apple is crushing it is because of news stories like this.

Also, there was no way prior to this article to know that this was the Mac's best quarter ever, or that the iPad outsold the Mac. Knowing both these facts now, I'm much more focused on adding integration and syncing features to the Mac application and iPad companion app I'm working on.

Apple has bet a significant portion of their business over the last 12-18 months on a mobile strategy. A very significant portion of the WWDC this year was focused on Mobile. Any developer out there wondering where to direct their energy into a new endeavor (and news.ycombinator.com is a place where such developers congregate, ycombinator being a well known seed fund) would be very interested in seeing Apple's success as an indicator of both the popularity of Apple Products as a development platform, and the mobile environment, in particular.

This is big news for the Hacker community that is interested in creating new startups. Clearly, the Apple Ecosystem has both legs and inertia for another quarter.

I continue to look forward to Google's, and, oddly enough, Micrsoft's response. I'm guessing we're going to see a lot of Mobile and Tablet news in the next 18 months based on Apple's most recent quarter. Less so on the Cloud - until, of course, Apple has a blowout quarter based on the revenue from their new $1B NC Data Center. :-)

Good article on how Jobs seriously went all-in on the original iPhone:

http://counternotions.com/2008/07/16/bet-iphone/